The Modern Automobile Must Die

New Republic Mag: ‘The Modern Automobile Must Die’ – ‘If we want to solve climate change, there’s no other option’

Excerpts:

‘Transportation is now the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States’

‘In 2010, a NASA study declared that automobiles were officially the largest net contributor of climate change pollution in the world.’

‘The power generation sector may have emitted the most greenhouse gases in total. But it also released so many sulfates and cooling aerosols that the net impact was less than the automobile industry, according to NASA.’

The problem is that most automakers seek to meet those requirements by developing electric cars. If those cars are charged with electricity from a coal-fired power plant, they create “more emissions than a car that burns petrol,” energy storage expert Dénes Csala pointed out last year.

“For such a switch to actually reduce net emissions, the electricity that powers those cars must be renewable.”